First:

Next:

About the Antirubbersheeter

The Antirubbersheeter exists in implicit critique of the tendency to
“georectify”
maps to fit into the Web
Mercator projection, as
though that’s the “correct,” in some way, a “faulty” map. As
Johanna Drucker reminds us, “the greater intellectual challenge is to
create spatial representations without referencing a pre-existing
ground.”1 Doing so turns space into a surface, “continuous and given,”
as Doreen Massey notes.2

Instead, we should follow Massey’s lead and remember that space is as
a place always “under construction,” and, as such, as one where
taking a representaion of space and “rectifying” it does violence to
the way the creators of the representation chose to distribute items
in space.3

Hence the Antirubbersheeter (
@muziejus/antirubbersheeter),
which aims to provide the usability of a web framework like
Leaflet but letting the representation itself
determine its coordinate scheme. Of course, that scheme remains
Cartesian, but computers have limitations.

The Antirubbersheeter lets you upload an image, which is subsequently
copied over to Imgur, which subsequently hosts
the image. Additionally, you add a comma-separated list of places you
would like to locate on the map and start the geocoder.

The page now becomes a familiar Leaflet map, but with your image in
the center. Here, you are prompted to place markers for each place
you included in your earlier list. Once all the places have been
recorded (click to place a marker, click the button to advance), a
modal will open with your dataset presented in JSON. You should copy
and save that object for later use in your own Leaflet projects, or
whatever.

See the GitHub
README if you want to
build your dataset locally on your computer and not use Imgur.

Package Mode Enabled

Your file was above 10mb in size. This isn’t a problem—after all,
this tool is best served on large, high-quality scans. But it does
mean things will work a bit differently.

Leaflet will have trouble with an image that large, so instead of
doing everything automatically for you right away, the
Antirubbersheeter will break up your image into tiles, package the
tiles up with some boilerplate code into a zipfile, and upload it all
to WeTransfer, where you can download the zipfile.

Once you unpack the zipfile on your computer, there will be a file in
the antirubbersheeter folder called index.html. Double-click on
that, and your image should load as a tiled map in your browser.

We’ll repeat these instructions at the end of the process, which could take a few minutes.